You only have to work against gravitational potential. The tether/earth provides the lateral kinetic energy.
Any cargo climbing to the upper floor would need to gain a proper orbital velocity. It might get it from the ground or from the upper floor or from its own engine. It means that you would need to provide some fraction of the lateral kinetic energy by accelerating laterally either the cargo or the upper floor.
When ducks suddenly emerge from a pond covered with duck-weed, I have twice seen these little plants adhering to their backs; and it has happened to me, in removing a little duck-weed from one aquarium to another, that I have unintentionally stocked the one with fresh-water shells from the other. But another agency is perhaps more effectual: I suspended the feet of a duck in an aquarium, where many ova of fresh-water shells were hatching; and I found that numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells crawled on the feet, and clung to them so firmly that when taken out of the water they could not be jarred off, though at a somewhat more advanced age they would voluntarily drop off. These just-hatched molluscs, though aquatic in their nature, survived on the duck's feet, in damp air, from twelve to twenty hours; and in this length of time a duck or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles, and if blown across the sea to an oceanic island, or to any other distant point, would be sure to alight on a pool or rivulet.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky
